This sermon discusses the practical aspects of conducting open-air street meetings, emphasizing the importance of drawing in crowds through engaging stories, music, and testimonies. It highlights the need for a structured yet flexible approach, utilizing portable equipment like trailers with PA systems and spotlights to create a captivating environment. The speaker shares insights on effective MC roles, handling hecklers, and providing invitations for people to respond to the message of Jesus Christ.

A couple more illustrations on these things that I mentioned to you before. Here are some valuable tools. First, an interlinear New Testament. This is good for in-depth study, for your inductive studies. And what this gives you, ones like this give you a literal Greek text, text in Greek and underneath it the literal English word, and then beside it a translation. This particular version has New International and King James side by side. Or you can get this other one, this is the Marshalls one, it's the same thing. That way you can see the way the actual thing reads in Greek, even if you don't know Greek, give you the literal translation underneath it. Those are valuable little things. Here is the Hebrew equivalent, which is a little thinner, of the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. I've got mine back in New Zealand, but you can get an idea. In the Hebrew versions they've got Ys and put the English transliteration beside it, so you don't have to read Hebrew in order to be able to use it. But it'll have the word, azkara, remembrance, and then it just gives you, you know, pages and pages on what that word is. So that's what a lexicon looks like. And these are horribly expensive things, don't even ask the price of this thing, don't even ask because I haven't got it. But anyway, this is Volume 4 and there's probably another 15 volumes probably in that set. Here's a valuable tool for Glory, for background study. This is a Bible encyclopedia, like a standard, like a regular encyclopedia, but it gives you, this is a four-volume set again, so you can imagine there's a lot of stuff in this. It gives you words, it gives you names, it gives you places, and it gives you, again, amplifications. What you're looking for is background material. And I, best place, when you're on teams and you're traveling, and you take a day off, go and find a good old secondhand bookstore. Go to the, look right through it. Go to the encyclopedia section, go to the biography section, and then go to the religious section. Because a lot of them don't know, you know, you'll find biographies by Booth, by Lewis, by all kinds of people. They don't know they're religious, so they put them in, they put them in under regular biographies. You'll find encyclopedias and stuff like that. And you can find some really neat things. Look through it. If you see anything that looks like it could be useful to you in terms of background, go for the finely printed old dudes like Keech and that. But if you find that kind of stuff, then just get it on the principle of the thing. And then this one helps you with geography of things. When this gives you all, these are really nice looking things, but, you know, how things are laid out. And again, this is all to help you visualize, to put you in the picture. When I watched Masada, for instance, Fay was there. See she went up there. You had to get up at some unearthly hour, 4.30 in the morning, because it was so hot there that you'd die in the heat out there if you're just a regular tourist. But she told me about that thing, Masada shall not fall again. I used that. I used that in all kinds of messages long before that came out. So that's your, then, now I want to give you your last thing on this thing, and then we'll practically go into the putting together of a sermon. The last section on this, we had a look at the wide look, the deep look, and the broad look. Now I call this one the personal look, and all it is, is sometimes you get passages in the Bible where two different places, the same event is described. Sometimes a lot of times in the New Testament, a few times in the book of Acts. Paul, for instance, gives his testimony three different times in the book of Acts. Now sometimes when you read these passages, you come to apparent contradictions in them. You know Paul says, in one part it says, they saw the light but they didn't hear the voice of him that spoke. Another one says, they heard the voice of him that spoke but they didn't see anybody. You know, so it looks like a contradiction. This area, one guy spent his life, and died before he finished doing this, it's called the life of Christ in stereo, and what he did is he put together a harmony of the gospels simply by dropping all passages where exactly the same thing is said, and keeping in wherever there's differences, all in order. So what you come up with is a single gospel composed of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all in chronological order with all of the little bits that one leaves out and the other one puts in. The reason why there are apparent contradictions are because Matthew will pick up little bits, Mark will pick up other bits, Luke, John, for instance, there's a huge percentage of John appears nowhere else in the Bible. So Matthew might say, a certain man came to Jesus who was a lawyer, and Mark might say, one of them who was a scribe. See, when you put the two together, a certain man who was a scribe, a certain man, one of them who was a lawyer and a scribe, so you get the whole picture of the thing. Now that's been done for you by this guy, but you can do it yourself simply by writing out the whole passage and putting them beside each other, and I call it interweave analysis. What you do is you take your different passages and you, wherever there's one that parallels like this, see, when these two say exactly the same thing, you just take out one of it and you leave whatever's different, and then you just write them all out together. You see, in other words, the passage I had once scribbled out one time is here in Matthew 22, 35 and Mark 12, 28, and it's better in Greek, but I'll give it to you in King James. Matthew 22, 35 says this, then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him and saying, now here's what Mark 12, 28, describing the same story says, and one of the scribes came and having heard them reasoning together and perceiving he had answered them well, asked him, alright, so on surface reading it says the guy's a lawyer and the other says he's a scribe. You put them together with this interweave analysis and this is what you come up with, and then one of the scribes came, one of them, which was a lawyer, and having heard them reasoning together and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him a question tempting him and saying, alright, and here's the way when you get both of those things interwoven together, you get a beautiful, rich account, and all you do is you drop out the extraneous words, Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Which is the first commandment of all? Jesus said to him and answered him, the first of all the commandments is, hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind and with all thy strength. This is the first and great commandment. The second is like unto it, namely this, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. It's rich and it's full and all you do is you interweave the two passages. And you can find on things like that, you find for instance that Peter actually denied Jesus six times, two sets of three. Three times kakru, another three times kakru, so it's six. All kinds of interesting little things come out of that interweave analysis. Just throw that in. Anyway, now the practice of putting a message together. The first part of this, you must ask God for an idea or a word or a text or something. You have to have a revelation. You can't just put a sermon together on words. It has to come by revelation. You understand what I mean by revelation? Not some big heavy thing, but a word. You get guidance on teams and stuff, right? You ask the Lord where should we go, what should we do? Ask Him for what He wants you to speak about. It's a simple thing. It goes like this. You say, God, what do you want me to talk about? Now I've waited sometimes and the Lord's given me one single word. I got a word once and I've used it sometimes in illustration. I got a word. I prayed all day. It was a major rally. It was my final thing before I was leaving New Zealand for the first time and going overseas. I started in the morning trying to get a message. Nothing. Prayed, fasted, waiting on God, nothing. And they're coming to pick me up at 5.30. This rally starts at 7. It's 5.25 and there's nothing. I got a blank sheet of paper. I got an open Bible. I'm all laggard. Concordance. I'm going crazy. Right? I'm getting dressed, looking at this thing. There's a knock on the door. I'm there with it. I say to God, what do you want me to talk about? And He said, run away. Just that word. Run away. Knock, knock, knock on the door. I grab my Bible. I've got a concordance on the back of it, right? Grab some sheets of paper and pen and driving in. I'm sitting in the back of the thing and I'm looking at every verse on runaway, every story on runaway. Just one word. But I'm looking at Adam and Eve. They're runaways. Jonah. He was a runaway. See? See, when you get the word from God, then everything else comes. That's what you have to get. The word. It doesn't have to be a word. It can be a story. It can be a principle. It can be, but it has to be quickened to your spirit. If it's quickened to your spirit, then the rest of it is fun. But the beginning of that is the pits. It is really the pits. I was writing that message all the way in the car, sitting in the rally. That's why I sit in the front of things and don't sit up on the stage, because I am writing three quarters of the time the message. That's exactly why I do that. You see me shuffle through notes and stuff. It's not that I'm unprepared. What I'm doing is, God is saying to me, go through that. So I get stuff and I'm going, I'm looking at stuff, and he's going, that, this, this. And I'm just hauling stuff out, and it looks totally klutzy, and this is not a pattern for you. I'm saying this, I'm so, I like everything cut and dried, so he keeps me fresh by doing it with me. The singing went through, the special music went through, the final singing, the final girl got up to sing, and then I'm on to speak, and I'm still writing. They called me up to speak, and I'm still writing. And I get up there, and I said, could everybody bow your heads and close your eyes, and I finished the message, and I wrote the last lines, right up there on the pulpit. And then I preached, and it was, it was, it was a powerful thing, we had a lot of people respond. At the end of it, I went down, and there was a girl sitting there, right in the front, never forgotten this, she was a polio cripple. And she was just total, she was weeping, weeping, weeping. And this girl called me up and said, this girl wants to talk to you, and went over and she said, you preach that message for me tonight. She said, tonight, I've been hanging around with this lesbian girl, she said, this is, this is the last Christian thing I was ever coming to, tonight that girl's going to pick me up, and go out to live with her. And she said, you preach on her, you know the last words I wrote up on that pulpit? You might be a Christian girl who has wandered far from the love of God. Tonight, His love tugs, tugs the strings of your heart again, come home, run away. Now, who would have known that a crippled girl could run away? God knew. See, and that whole hassle I had all day, I don't know if it was the devil or what, I don't care. I know that when I got up to speak, I had a word from God. And then it doesn't matter if you're not fancy, and it doesn't matter if things don't fit. When God is giving you a word, people will know it, and it'll change lives. So your task, gentlemen and ladies, is to get a word from God. And the rest of it is detail. The rest of it is what I've given you here. When you get that word, this is what I do, I get a sheet of paper, a big sheet of paper, just a scribbly sheet of paper, I try to find, being Scottish in ancestry, an old envelope or something that I can rip open and scribble all over. Because that's not your final shot. What you're doing on that is you write down what things you get straight away. You write first. You don't do all your study first. You write what you've got first. And as fast as you get it, write it down, because God will give you a stream of things. You'll start on the back of the car, all right, run away. Adam and Eve. See, I've just put Adam and Eve, scribble, leave space. Jonah. Jesus was not a runaway. See? He could have let this cup pass from me, but he didn't. See? Kids run away. They run away in their minds, they run away in their lives. See? That one word is triggering all of this stuff, and then all of the stuff you've done before, your Bible reading, your inductives, your topicals, will all come flashing back to you. Now, when you've written yourself out, and you've got all that you can see, then go into each one and inductive it, or topical it, or whatever. Go to Adam and Eve. Read the story through. See? Why did they run away? Who did they run away from? See? Then you'll get all kinds of other things that come out of that. And you'll leave plenty of space between each one of these things. Then you'll find that there's all kinds of... You're getting a message is what you're getting. Depending on the kind of message it is, this is great for preaching. You can preach this anywhere. You can preach in a street. If you're doing a teaching thing, you tend to go to more inductives. You know, the words, that kind of stuff. But with this, it'll probably be more topical, and then analytical, just the overall thing of it. You're not doing a... You're trying to reach people with something. So that's the base of it. Now, when you've got your rough scribble, then you've got a... Your next job is to start rewriting it. Get a decent piece of paper, and then write it. And I use different colors of magic markers and stuff for major... Remember when we talked about major themes and stuff? You write your major themes, which are your major points, in different colors. I have like a red or something for all the major points. Now, here's a couple little guidelines that may help you. This is only red, preached red stuff. I'm trying to get as practical as I can now in your actual street preaching and stuff. Because a lot of these things, you do... All you need is some outlines to hang things on, to talk from. But the more detailed you get, the more quality you'll put into your message. All right? And we'll give you a mix on both these things. When you write your stuff, use a free verse format if you're going to read it. By free verse, I mean don't put all your stuff and fill the whole page up. It is better to have a couple of sheets and do it like this. Main point. See? Adam and Eve. Adam ran away in his... physically. He ran away emotionally. See? Instead of physically, emotionally, mentally. And the reason is, because when you're up here, and you've got to just glance at that thing, you've got to pick it up first time, or you're going to miss it. You can't afford going, let's see, let's see, I think it's down there. So by having it like this, you can high point easily. These are all different colors. See? And then it'll pull you through quickly. Now, by the way, if you're speaking from... If you're speaking in a large thing, and you've got notes, don't be afraid to look deliberately at them. Because first of all, you're not trying to pretend to people you don't have notes. That's the worst. You know, it's like, that's the pits. It is really stupid. If you're going to use notes, use them deliberately. I learned from watching Billy Graham preach. By watching, getting up in a place where I could look down and watch. He's very deliberate. You watch next time he preaches. He'll go, boom. And then he'll look. It's very deliberate. And it's so deliberate, you don't notice it. You've never noticed him looking at his notes. But he does it so deliberately. He'll say, you know, whatever he says. The world is a conflict full of tension. And then he'll go like that. So use them deliberately. Don't be afraid to. If I'm using notes in a meeting, I will hold them up. I'll look at them, you know, like this. Don't pretend you're not, if you are. If you want unobtrusive things, you can use cards or you can stick things in your Bible. Get a Bible that's big enough and put your notes right in there. By the way, let me turn you on to a little thing I found the last year. See these little yellow things in the side? They're a note, post-note thing that Scotch puts out. It's sticky permanently, but it sticks on and doesn't tear off. It stays sticky permanently. You can put them in for Bible marking. You can get larger ones, about this big. So if you need Bible markers, see that? How easy you can find that? And you can get big enough ones to scribble notes on and stick them right in there on your Bible. Because sometimes when you're preaching in the open air, your wind is blowing and there's nothing, man. It'll blow right off. They're called post-notes. They come in little packets, but you can reuse them all over the place. So I just use them. I keep them in front of my Bible until I, you know. That's a practical thing. You can buy Bibles that are loose-leaf Bibles, but they're a bear if you drop them. You know, there's one, if you drop it, it's all over. There was another one I bought in my early years that has a nice clip on it, a big strong clip that locks down, and I put all the messages in there. But what I'm going to now are plastic sheets, heavy transparent plastic sheets that you can stick your notes in. Because, I mean, I've preached in rain. It comes down and totals out. Your notes all start running. I preached with half an inch of rain on a pulpit one time, and all my notes just ran right there. So write your notes in waterproofing and use magic markers and stuff. If you can put it on. The reason you need something heavy, because if you've got anything to put anything on, you might need a rubber band or something to actually lock it down and hold it there. Because in street preaching, if you can hold anything at all, it's going to be a Bible. It's going to be hard to do this kind of stuff. All right? Now, in your final thing, when you're finished, by the way, I can't give you the whole thing on sermons and stuff here, but you must expect the most particular attention you need to pay to is what you say at the start and what you say at the end. Everything else in the middle is not so important as those two things. The opening statement, you'll lose them or gain them, and at the end you'll lose them. Peter Marshall used to say, be like the oyster that shows discretion at its openings and knows when to close. So, have enough. You know what's good on this too? If you've got illustrations, these are all just practical things off the top of my head. If there's an illustration that you know well, one that you'd like to use, I put little things like this in my messages, you know, a child or something like this, and that little deal, then you can leave your notes. Do you see? You can leave your notes. You can describe it, you can tell it, just like that, and then when you come back, you come back right to where you left off and go on with your continued things. Now, guys like Dave Wilkerson's a dynamic, powerful preacher, and most of his sermons are read. I mean read. If you watch Dave, he actually reads his messages. He'll open it up and he'll go, tonight I want to talk to you about a fire. He just reads right out there, and don't despise that, because Jonathan Edwards did it and people fell out of their chairs. George Whitefield. Jonathan Edwards preached like this. He was short-sighted and he held his thing about six inches away and he had a monotone. He read his sermons like that from open manuscript like that. Street meetings, you do not need a sermon for street meetings. This is more for, you know, the mass meeting, like you've got a concert or something and a bunch of people come in and you want to, you know, you've got a 45-minute thing you've got to speak. That's where you use this. Street meetings, what you need is the old classic three-pointer type thing. Just three little keys or, you know, just a few keys. And what I do is get one of those little notebooks, a little ring-bound notebook about this big, big enough to fit in your Bible, and do some simple three-point outlines in that thing. You know, with good stories, good tight little stories, illustrations, personal illustrations, a few scriptures, not a lot of things. And then just use those as hooks because in a street meeting, you do not have the time first. You can't preach for 45 minutes. You just haven't got an audience that long. You need to think of about a seven-minute thing, max, that's it. And if you can't say what you have to say in seven minutes, don't think of saying anything. There'll be rare times when you've got a huge crowd and they're there and they'll just stay. Now that's unusual. And what I did for the street meetings, I had a bunch of little messages that I just wrote out, used them once or twice, and then put them in full in this little folder. I can take that little folder with me and then when I get into a situation, I can just open that out and go with a particular one that I think will fit the situation. See that? You need that. All right, let me show you the practice of the street meeting really quickly. And then we'll have some questions and stuff. Make them as practical as you like because this is stuff you can't put in books, you know. And I'm just giving you what works for me and you may find all kinds of other things. But here's the way a street meeting is. Most street meetings are horrible because people do not know how to do a street meeting. The average street meeting is a guy standing on the corner yelling and screaming until he's hoarse with people going past embarrassed. That is the average street meeting. And that's the pits because we had those in New Zealand. We had little groups of people dressed in black in the corners of the streets on Sunday afternoons going, Behold the Lamb of God! You know, and people would go, Oh man, you know. So this was the pits. And no matter what they... I won't totally disown it, but I'll just say that I was a Christian. I was embarrassed. I didn't even want to be near there and I was saved. So I can imagine what unsaved people felt like. To do a street meeting properly, the key word is transient. See? Your audience is not fixed. They move. So you have to stop that audience. You've got to stop them for long enough to hear what you have to say. I figured we had a roughly three to five minutes max from the time they first came into hearing or seeing us up the road, we had PA systems, to the time they left. And during that three to five minutes they had to hear the gospel one way or another. That meant if there were songs, they didn't have 800 verses, you didn't sing, you know, you didn't have long instrumental things that went on for 20 minutes. If you had music, it had to be short and it had to be punchy. Testimonies could not be involved. They had to be short things. They had to be to the point. And the sermon was not preached until your crowd stopped. Okay? Now, what we did is we built a platform. Harold helped do this, so you can talk to him about the practice of it. We actually built a little trailer like this. It was a pull-behind-a-car trailer, a little flat thing, you know, like a little Bethany trailer type thing. It opened up like this. It had a little top, a flat top that opened up. In the back you laid your speakers and a little canvas thing that covered it over and it plugged into a battery charger overnight. It had a couple of car batteries in parallel on it, so it could run a long time. It opened up like this. Two speaker columns were pulled off, sat them right here like this. In the front of the speaker, the column was like this. Oh boy, this chalk is great. In the back of these, it had little car headlights, car headlights, high-intensity car headlights, slanted back so that they form spotlights from the front. And then down here was speakers and in the middle, and one thin, flat PA system, solid-state, running off the car battery and a little space underneath that for tracks and for counseling stuff. See? So what you had then is one little mic stand that you either moved around or just plugged right into the trailer. And you can have as many as you like. We only had one. That was our total unit. And then these little, so it looked like this. Well, it's best to show you this. Sitting on the front of it were two speaker stands like that, shorter, of course, but that high. You used the back of it for preparing things and back here for counseling. See? And then we set it up right at the main pedestrian crossroads in a parking lot, something like that. So you've got roads crossing like this and there's a parking lot here and we got permission to set it up right there in the parking lot, back a little bit off the road so you didn't jam the traffic. Alright? But so that anybody in all directions could see it. Now, what do you do with your people? You form a people net. Here's the way the average Christian thing is. Bunch of people standing here in a tight little group, right? Somebody speaking here. Alright? Here's the footpath. You're a sinner. You come along. What do you do? You go, hmm, oop! And you go past, alright? Here's what we did. The people that were watching spread out. See? Loose groups. Right across. Some leaning on lampposts here. Some back up the road a little bit. See? Then you come wandering along. You see a crowd of people there. So you just sort of, you look for a little group to be with. You don't put all your Christians together unless you've only got three of them, you know. Then you put them wherever you can. They're all up on stage. But we have, see we'd pull in about 20 or 30 people minimum to run this thing. The bigger the crowd you have, the more crowds it pulls. And then we used music. We used anything we lay hands on. Our music was the pits. I mean we had got to be the worst music. But we, I cannot remember a time when we didn't see people save. All we'd do, we'd build this little trailer so you could pull it down and set it up in about five minutes. I mean you could pull it anywhere. It had big tires on it. You could pull it right out in the sand. You could set it up on the beach. Pull the thing on, stick the thing, plug it in and run about four hours on the batteries we had with lights and PA and everything going so you could set it up anywhere. And all it had is, this little thing came up there. It had a couple little clips that locked the stand up there. And this was just a very light backdrop thing. We had a sign we could stick up on the top. You know, just a little sort of plug-in thing that plugged in some pipes up here. This side here we had a drawing board and a guy who was an artist would draw and people would stand around and watch, see, while people were talking. And he preached too. So what he'd do is he'd block out things and wouldn't put the final detail lines in until just before he spoke. So people would stand there working out what he'd do and then he'd come up and he'd just, he'd put the final lines in and he'd say, I've just drawn the end of the world. Are you ready for it? And he'd just lay this seven minute thing on people. It was unbelievable, the power of the thing. You use your music to draw the crowds. When the crowds come, you intersperse the music with a few testimonies and then you put, when the crowd is there and they're interested, you put the speaker on. And he, she does not speak very long. All they do in essence in that thing is give a little story. It's story orientated outside. You don't want people to get, come in the middle of some big long exposition on something. They'd just pass by on the other side of the road. You tell them stories and nobody wants to leave till they hear the end of that story. We had all kinds of little, look for stories. You can be funny, you can be sad, you can be anything you want to be, but you cannot be unreal. You've got to be, it's got to be right off the, you know, right out of the heart and right there. And, and with the people net, people would come up, see, and then these people are working nets. That, that, you know, a person would stand up there and they're not all dressed, looking like, you know, hey, we all belong to the same gang, sort of thing. People would stand and, you know, they'd say, hi, and say, you know, and not, hi, welcome to the. After the guy's standing there for a while, the person might say, what do you think of that? What do you think of this? And the guys start talking, and then, they'd, they'd do the witnessing out in the audience. But, we always gave an invitation. At the end of each speaking thing, we gave an invitation. It was very simple. This is the one we used. If any of you would like to know, we tell them, we're kids from all different backgrounds, from all different churches. Some of us have no church background. Some of us come from churches. Some of us belong to this thing and that thing. But we're here with one single purpose, to tell you about the love of Jesus Christ and how your life can be changed. And we say, if any of you would like to know how to meet Jesus, we are going to make ourselves available for you, to help you in any way we can. And if you're interested in that, I'd like you to come up and take one of these little things that I have here. One of these gifts we have, a little gospel of John or something. And shake my hand. And I just hold it up. Like that. And never say, is there one? Is there one out there? That's what you get, brother. One. If you're lucky. There are many of you out there that need to give your life to Jesus Christ. If you're here tonight, it doesn't matter whether you're, if you're religious or irreligious, you can be an atheist, an agnostic, Jewish, Krishna, Protestant, Catholic, it doesn't matter to us. If you'd like to know the living God, then come up and just hold this thing up. And that's where your faith rises. And listen, we did this for I don't know how many years, at least seven years. I cannot remember one single night when people weren't saved. Never did we go out and have nothing. Never. And we had terrible music. We had, and usually when it was the pits is when God did the best, you know. When we had our greatest teams, nothing really heavy, but sometimes we'd see, you know, 20 or 30 people get saved when there was nothing. We're just crying out to God. Oh, just before we went down, we had a monstrous prayer meeting. Just like an army, you know, and then we'd run this trailer right out of the, woo-woo, and we'd go down and set that dude up and then go straight into it. And timing and place is important. People are weird. They put a street meeting where there's nobody around and there never will be anybody around. Go to where the picture theaters are, where the dance halls are. Put them out right outside there. Where are the kids? Go where they are. Don't put them out in some supermarket where there's only, and at one in the afternoon when there's no kids there. There's only a few ladies shopping, you know. Don't think. When you go into a town, find out where all the kids are. Where do they hang out? Where is there nothing? Where they're waiting for buses to take them home and stuff. Find out those places. Go where the people are. Then set your thing up. We helped some people in doing it. Somebody in Scotland was trying to do one. They said, well, we tried it up in there. It wasn't very effective. I said, when do you do it? We do it every afternoon at one o'clock in the middle of the town. I said, well, who is there? Well, you know, yeah, that's a good question. Who is there? And I said, where are the kids? Well, they don't get out of school till four. Well, who are you trying to reach? Well, well, I said, when are they? Well, there's a lot around there at about twelve, but that's beyond our bedtime. I said, then sleep in the daytime and go out at twelve o'clock and set your open air up. When they're out there for three hours, do nothing at nighttime. And that's exactly what they did. And you've got a really great crowd. People came from all over the place. There was nothing to do. They're sitting down there. They came to laugh and stayed to pray. But that's the open air thing. Practice on it then. The guy who's running it has to have available maybe a little card or something of testimonies, music, testimonies, and who's available to preach. And should know that before you get down there. In other words, you know, can you speak? Can you be ready to speak tonight? You know, you and you and you and you. You pick two or three. And can I get a testimony from you tonight? And can you give us a couple of songs? You know, when I say a couple of songs, that's one song and another song some other time. Not both together. So the MC, the open air is good for MC. MC type person. He just talks and ties it all together because while people are getting ready and stuff, you can't have no thing going on. Something has to be there all the time because you've only got, remember, about three minutes. And somehow from the time that person first hears the music to the time they pass on, then you've got to hook them and stop them so they want to listen, even if it's only for a minute. And during that minute, they have to hear enough about Jesus to make them hungry. Okay? That's the open air. We took it in beaches. We took it out into parks. We took it into any place. All right? That's it. Any questions? Cathy? You were preaching to the MC? No. No. No. The MC ought not to preach unless he can fit it in naturally or she can fit it in naturally. No. You need time to prepare. You need time to pray. And you can't do that when you're MC. MC was an exhorted type person that was happy, that said, you know, it's so good to be here. Yeah. And then, hey, I'll get somebody I want you to meet and pull them up and interviews. Testimonies don't have to be, you know, I'd say, when did you meet the Lord and what kind of background did you have? And it's this thing. See, people stop and listen just what is going on here. And it ought not to be religious. It's got to be very real. It's got to knock them off their feet. Any others questions on practice? John? When you were, did you ever just do it without the little... The trailer? Yeah. You can do it. But you, again, I didn't, none of us had really loud voices. And the only trouble is we're competing with traffic, with, sometimes with bands, with everything. So, you, you can do it without it. But, especially if you've got music, like trumpets or something like that that can carry the sound. I'll just say, I'm glad I'm born this generation and not in Whitfields. He could be heard on a clear day for five miles, but I can't be heard on a clear day outside for more than three minutes. My voice just packs in. I don't know how to, how those guys could do it. They could diaphragm it or something. They had leather lungs. you can do it. If you have a PA, it doesn't, again, it can be a portable thing, see. It's just that the more, interesting things in the further, you don't have to annoy people, but, the more excitement you can create, the more people will come. Yeah? Yes, I think it's fine. We didn't have anybody who could do it. I mean, Ed, if you'd have seen our stuff, you wouldn't have believed it. You probably would have believed it. It was terrible. It was really bad. I mean, the best stuff we had was like one guy could play a trumpet and it wasn't even very good. But, we saw people saved, all the time, because, they really loved God, they were spiritual people, and they were real as they knew how to be. You know, and we went out there expecting God to do something. We didn't get up our knees till we believed God was going to work, that night. And we went down there and He did. And miracles! It would come there, it would be raining, it would be flooding outside, just really raining, and we'd say, do you want us to have an hour of veneer tonight? He'd say yes, and I'd say, well we ask you in the name of Jesus to stop the rain, amen. We'd finish our prayer meeting and the rain would stop, and the clouds would be dark, and all the people would come out on the streets, and we'd preach for three hours, and people would get saved, and we'd close it up, and the last guy would get in the thing, close the thing, and the rain would come down and rain for two days. And one time, we were preaching, and a guy came up and he said, this is really weird. He said, do you know this is the only area over Auckland where it's not raining? Right here. He said, I've just been down by the waterfront and it's raining, and it's, so it was heavy. We had such a simple confidence in God that he would do what he promised to do. Would you give a couple of, just like a basic topic for some of the sermons that you preached? They weren't very profound. They would be, I'll tell you one thing. This would be a typical thing. I don't have any of that stuff with me at all, immediate, I could lay my hands on. Most of the sermons I'd come up and I'd tell a story about a guy who would drive through a border, ride through a border on a bicycle with a big sack over his back, and the customs guy stopped him and say, what do you got in the sack? And he'd say, sawdust. And they'd say, oh yeah. And they'd get out and he'd shake all his stuff out and they'd check that sack and they'd analyze the sawdust and that's what it was, sawdust. They'd go, okay, and they'd pass them on. He did this every week, came through with a sack of sawdust. And he did it for years. I mean, he'd ride through this and finally the customs guy retired and he met this guy in a bar and he said to him, hey, he said, I'm out of the customs now and I haven't seen you for a long time but he said, I know you were smuggling stuff in that bag. What were you smuggling? And the guy said, bicycles. And then I said, you know, a lot of people like that, they look in the wrong direction and go straight into it. See, people hang around for the story and then just plug them right in. Have you looked in such and such? Boom. Illustration. Here was a young man who looked for it in the world of music and a guy came up and shot him dead on the streets. Here's another saying, another young man who did this, a girl who, see, just, basically stories woven around one thing, one basic thing. I said, people are looking in the wrong direction. The only way you can find the right direction is to turn around. You're headed in the wrong direction. There's somebody who can change you and make you different and that word is repent. If you will be willing to turn then Jesus will change your life. And, many of us here were looking in the wrong direction. We looked at this and that and so and so was into eastern stuff and so and so over here was into this. We're standing here as living testimonies of the reality of Jesus Christ. Now, there may be many of you out there that do not know Jesus. And we are here to help you. We're not, you're not going to join, we're not here to put you into some new religion or anything. We want you to meet Jesus. And, if you're interested in knowing Him, we are here to help and we'd love to help you. So, if you want us to help you and, there are many of you here that need to know Him, would you come up, up here and shake my hand and take one of these little books and we'll be happy to talk with you and hold it up. That's right. Stand out there looking like a jerk. That's right. Why do we want, we needed an invitation of some kind and the sheet of little come up and get this thing was our contact. It took an act of faith for a person to step out of that crowd and do it. And then, the actual count of people counseling from there was a simple thing. The guy would come and then, you know, we had good counselors and they'd say, what did you, do you really want to know the Lord? Well, you know, do you know what, see and then, then it's witnessing. The purpose of a street meeting is both, is to draw the interest because it's a mile different than just giving out tracts and stuff on the street. Nobody knows anything when you give them a tract on the street they may throw it away. You know, they got that one shot but they can watch this. We had people wait two or three hours just watching. The, the guy was the Beatles manager. Yeah, Brian Epstein killed himself three months after. He stood through an entire opening meeting an hour and a half. We had it right before the Beatles concert and there were thousands of kids massing in the town hall and we had it set it up right down a thousand yards away from the town hall and there's this well-dressed guy stood there for an hour and a half and his face looked familiar. I was trying to pick where I'd met him. I, I thought if I met that guy before I'd seen him and finally he left and he went back up to the concert just as we finished and a friend of mine said, do you know who that, I just saw this guy do you know who that guy was and I said no, I thought I'd seen him so that was Brian Epstein. Three months later he killed himself. He sat and he listened and he listened for an hour and a half so you know I know God gives people chances. No, we do different things because some of the people stay and the, the most important thing you, you must get through is this is not a show. Not a show. This is people sharing. That's why we'd have just a, it'd be better to close it after you've done everything that you can to then it's, it's not a concert you're doing. It's an open air meeting and that means you have to have available a bunch of different things you can do. People could come up and give a testimony again if you like but we, we never used people unless they were singing more than once or twice a night and it's a great, it's a great introduction for people and learn more about preaching in a street meeting than you learn almost anywhere else because if you can't hold the people you'll know immediately. You know, I mean, you know everybody's nice and polite and agave voice and you could preach and bore everybody to tears and they'll still sit there but boy, in an open air meeting you are preaching to nothing. If you're not holding them they are gone so it's a great introduction and, Ed? I think one of the things he's referring to is did you have like a set program that you just break? No. Oh yeah, yeah, we could do it in blocks. Yeah, we could do it in blocks. It, it all depends on your thing. Sometimes we ran continuously because the MC remember was not counseling and as I said we had about 30 or 40 people sometimes there of our own people so we could call on brand new Christians get brand new Christians it's neat man. We'd call you know a guy being saved a week and say here's John he's just given his life to the Lord and interview him not just hand him a microphone you know and say here you are John do it. You know we'd say you know what's you know where are you from my name's John what's your background what did you come what town did you come from so the MC kind of ties everything together. Well how did you know what happened in your life? So the guy's not left floundering but it gives him steel in his backbone you know he learns very fast. See I I that's how I got preaching. I played the bongos for three months in the darkest corner of the open air that was the most radical thing that I could ever think of doing and then they asked me would you give a testament oh man and I tried to memorize it forgot it and when I got up it was too dark I couldn't read it so that's how I got on the speak meeting. You can do whatever you're comfortable with if you want a break and counsel you might have to do that if you only have a few people but we had enough people to keep counsel and then call in others to whatever you do an open air has to be done right. Don't do it if it's Mickey Mouse if it's Mickey Mouse to you it's going to be Mickey Mouse. Yes OIC yeah they do yeah they do they have OIC Open Air Campaignants they've probably done something for 25 30 years now open airs and they have a little Volkswagen van they converted it's a neat little thing the bottom drops down like this and forms like steps and the top opens instead of the doors opening this way they open this way and the top of it has some spotlights back in like this and I've forgotten where the microphone comes down from the top or up from the bottom but they can pull their van up to the side to the curb and just do things right out of their van which is an incredible thing you don't need a parking lot or anything you just park on the side of the road and the PA and all that's in the thing and they finish they just close the van up and drive away and that's it but you know that's a custom thing they built yeah it wasn't as large as that I mean that would be a ridiculous thing but it the only key thing is you got to be a little higher than the crowd so they can see you that's the soapbox principle you know if you're down crowd level only the front people hear you your voice would be blocked you got to be a little higher and if you're too high they're looking at knees you know so we our platform was just two steps up it was two steps up it was about that high so you stood and people could see you down the road do you think it's good if you hand out stuff they would be more apt to come up at the end oh during the open air yeah we didn't give out tracks during the open air unless you put it on your net after on both ends you know not for people see net people would pick up somebody coming in this direction that's past the open air and then people on this end would pick up nobody would hand out stuff to people coming down I don't know but we never did that we didn't use tracks a lot except for actual it's hard you know giving tracks out to people we used sandwich boards on sometimes anything any way you can get a crowd of people together to listen for seven minutes is worth it weird guys lying down on the streets you know how long from the moment someone stood up on the platform something started happening not more than half an hour at the most I would imagine not more than half an hour in the close of that we'd we might take a break of about you know a minute or two it doesn't matter you see if you've got a lot of people standing around talking it doesn't matter people are walking past it doesn't matter they don't know what it is anyway it looks like and you can start up again yeah sure or drawing have somebody drawing sketching you know no they shine at you no you can't see out in the crowd most of the time they just all they do is light up the stage so at night time we had our sort of shining they're just broad we just used a couple of old car headlights you know and they just because they don't use that much the the battery would last with the PA and those weren't very efficient on those days you know those little high intensity tensor bulbs couple of those dudes on goosenecks boy you could the only important thing was that they could see from a long distance away hey there's something lit up and there's music coming and they'd head over and it had to be portable so we ran hours on I think two car batteries plugged the trailer in at night time after 24 hours it was ready to go again for another three or four hours yeah just let them yeah it wasn't like everybody had to do that it was the way it was just wisdom it wasn't you didn't feel like you had to witness to people if you were standing beside them because on that basis you might interrupt people see if you made it a legal thing and said listen everybody everybody witnesses to everybody standing here's a guy and he's listening and he's really being touched and the guy goes what do you think of that you know and you just you had to be sensitive to God so each kid was just on their own whichever way they felt but that was just something they could do as a kid sitting there and he's sort of thinking and stuff and if he was sensitive he might the person might say you know what do you think of that and get into it or just that kind of thing you know it was nothing was legally structured everything was go with the flow the only thing that we had was that the guy would know that that person would be there and he would check it each half time to make sure that person knew that they'd be on next time you know the guy would say like listen I'm gonna use you can you sing your song and then I'll put on a couple of testimonies and then I want you to do that song and then can you preach so the guy knew that then he wouldn't get in some big heavy counseling thing and then the guy's gone where is he oh excuse me see that but everything was back up a list of people who could preach a list of people who could give testimonies that night a list of music and what was available and you know if something got hung up he could say go to somebody else it says John here and he'd look and there was John over there counseling and say well John's talking to somebody but Jack can you come up the MC had to keep his eye on everything and watch it but he didn't have to work that much all he had to do was just introduce everything and make sure that everybody he was administrative well we were all there to do it every person who was at the prayer meeting see the prayer meeting is where people knew about the open air we never invited anybody down they came to the prayer meeting first and if they'd been there praying for an hour they're never ready to do anything that God said and a lot of people some people are scared they don't know how to start things and if you put pressure on them to do it then it's really hard on them it's like saying ok we're going to witness right now you take this guy Jack you know and you think you die you don't know what to do you feel embarrassed so we wanted it to be natural for it to rise out of the situation and the open air created the situation that's the hardest part of witnessing not hard to witness people once they're talking to you the hard part is getting them to talk to you they don't want to talk to you they're scared that you're some freaky person or you're some cult that's coming down the pike or you want to get them to join something or you know that's their so if that's all broken for you it's neat somebody's there and they you know if they've been there 15 minutes they're not mildly interested yeah well in this particular case it was the name of the group we worked with but you could put anything you want to put up there it was just a plug-in thing so people thought what is this thing yeah we had some bounces the bounces were when guys started putting hits on our girls that was what they were doing and and the bouncer all he did is he went across and started witnessing the guy he would what he'd do is here's a girl and some guy's trying to put some make on this girl so the guy would stand behind the girl she'd be here and he would stand behind her looking over her shoulder at the guy and just look at him see and the guy would keep talking and eventually he'd stop and then the guy would just step in and start talking to the girl stand there for a little once and say excuse me and leave see and if the guy had no real interest he'd split and if he was the guy just go on so the guy just stayed since we didn't have people figured out for that but the guys were just again so you have no idea what's going to happen the key word again is transient because it's transient you really have to rely on the spirit you have to rely on the leading of God you cannot if we structured a program nine times out of ten it would fall apart you could not structure it you could say Jack will preach and then we'll have and then Jack some guy would come up and say hey listen man my life's falling apart there's your preacher you can't say hey listen leave that guy doesn't matter if he's lost you need to preach so that people can get saved you couldn't do that you had to just go with the flow and play it by ear oh we had hecklers all the time but it was neat because that as we were studying in James there tribulation works patience yeah it was neat it was a neat thing we used to if there was we prayed for them sometimes I had a guy who put away fifteen year old who put away two cases of beer two cartons of beer on his own and he was he was like this he was just you know he was totaled and I saw God sober him up instantly and I led him to the Lord with all his friends standing around laughing at him and he's still serving God today okay if you can do it Mauro could do it I can't do it Mauro Amarillo could do it Mauro could get out with a bull horn and be a one man army brother and people would come running from all over the place but I can't I've tried it it's the pits for me